(typewriter dinging) (typewriter clacking) - I'm Brad Thor, and my book is "Dead Fall."

(solemn music) There is a rogue Russian military unit.

They've gone AWOL, and they're committing horrific war crimes in the interior of Ukraine because all the able-bodied men are off fighting the war.

While these guys are rampaging through the countryside of Ukraine committing horrific war crimes, an American aid worker goes missing.

Now, America can't send in troops because then Russia will say, "You've committed to the war.

We're now at war with the United States."

So the US says, "We've got one guy, we'll send our top spy into Ukraine."

And they give them one assignment, find her.

If she's dead or alive, we want her back, and then we want everyone responsible for taking her to pay.

And so that's what happens.

My main character, Scot Harvath, gets sent over, America's number one spy, to find her, bring her back, and make the bad guys pay.

(solemn music) - This is 22 in the Scot- - In the Scot Harvath series, yes.

- What do you think makes this character have such longevity for you?

- For me as a writer, I know why I like it, because he is my alter ego.

I joke that he gets to do the things that my wife won't let me do, right?

But I think readers really enjoy Harvath because no matter how tough it is, he always does the right thing.

So if you're gonna have a representative of the American government who you're gonna take the shackles off of, and you're gonna say, "Listen, no Marcus of Queensbury, you go do what needs to be done.

We're kinda not gonna look, no rule book for you."

You can't send a sadist to do that job, somebody that delights in hurting other people.

You have to send somebody with a good moral compass who's only gonna break the rules if he has to to save that American citizen or stop that bomb from going off in Times Square or whatever.

So I think what people love about Harvath is not only does he do the right thing, but he's somebody you'd wanna sit down and have a beer with.

He's got a sense of humor, he's a human being, he's not a Superman, he's not dodging bullets the whole book.

- Right.

- You know, he's based on a lot of people that I know that are still in the field and are, you know, they're doing everything they can to remain out there because they believe that there is no American dream without those willing to protect it.

(solemn music) - "Dead Fall" was clearly inspired by the atrocities in Ukraine.

Is it dangerous to know that you're writing about events in real-time, knowing that this book won't come out though for another year?

- Yeah, so that was a concern.

But the way I approached this was I grew up loving thrillers that took place in World War II.

And I love the movies like "Saving Private Ryan," I love the series "Band of Brothers," the tank movie with Brad Pitt, "Fury," fantastic.

And I always wanted to write a story like that for Harvath, my main character.

And I couldn't put him in the DeLorean and beam him back to, you know, 1930s, 1940s Europe.

(Jeremy chuckling) But what I could do is take advantage of what is happening in Ukraine and use it as a backdrop.

So my goal with "Dead Fall" is to create an evergreen story that would be along the lines of a "Saving Private Ryan", "Band of Brothers," "Fury" sort of a thing that you could pick up "Dead Fall" five, 10 years from now and still have a great thrill ride.

So that was my goal with this.

But yeah, I was worried about writing a, setting a thriller in real-time that there could be a major thing that might change over there and could have an impact, but I got lucky.

- You got lucky, and I think the book will stand alone.

(soft orchestral music) How do you get the details right when you're not there yourself?

- For a book, many years ago, I went over to Afghanistan during the war and I embedded with a unit over there, and got to see a lot of what was going on.

I like to travel to the places I write about and meet the people there.

If I can't, then I want to talk to somebody who is operated there.

So I wanna talk to somebody who's in special operations, the intelligence community, something like that.

And I'm lucky enough to have great contacts that I can get wired into people and talk to people.

We've got Americans on the ground helping train forces in Ukraine.

So we're not fighting, but there are Americans that are fighting for the Ukrainian International Legion.

And I will tell you, in addition to the people I was able to network into, this is really the first war that you can actually watch unfold on GoPro.

If you go on YouTube, so many Americans, Canadians, Australians, so many English-speaking soldiers, helping the Ukrainians fight are streaming everything.

So it was an amazing wealth of video for me to actually watch these battles unfold and things like that.

- I had no idea.

(solemn music) When did you realize that you wanted to write books specifically about international intrigue and terrorism threats?

- So, you and I, before we started rolling, we're talking about, my career was in public television.

I mean, I've come home- - You have.

- To do this show.

- Welcome home.

- Yeah, thank you.

(Jeremy chuckling) So I had done two seasons of my travel show, "Traveling Light."

It was nationwide on public television.

I was the producer, the writer, the host.

It was the late '90s, early 2000s.

And I got married, and my wife and I went on our honeymoon, and we were in Italy in a piazza one night having a glass of wine, and my wife asked me a question.

I joke around, this is a good question to ask before you get married, not on the honeymoon.

And she said, "What would you," 'cause it's very revealing, and she said, "What would you regret on your deathbed never having done?"

And I never finished that first book, I'd only written a couple chapters.

And I said, "I would regret never trying to write a novel, getting it finished, and getting it published."

And she said, "Okay, when we get home, you need to start spending two hours of protected time every day, making that dream come true."

So it was with Trisha's encouragement that I decided to do that when I got home.

But what's interesting is on that trip, we had an overnight train ride from Munich, We'd been at Oktoberfest, to Amsterdam, and I met a young lady, and we had a shared overnight train compartment, young brother and sister from Atlanta, Georgia.

- Okay.

- Big public television watchers.

They recognized me right away.

They were fans of the show.

- Wow.

- And the young lady in this brother/sister team and I stayed up talking about books all night long.

And I thought, okay, I've told my wife I'm gonna write a book.

I'll tell her, because the more people I tell, I'll really be committed to doing this.

- Right.

- And so we talked books, and she said, "Are you gonna make more episodes of your public television travel show when you get home?"

And I said, "No, I'm gonna, actually, we're on a break right now, I'm gonna write a novel."

When we pulled into the train station in Amsterdam the next morning, we went to exchange information and she handed me her business card, and she was a sales rep for Simon & Schuster.

- No kidding.

- Yeah.

She said, "If you write that book, I wanna read your manuscript, and if I can help you with Simon & Schuster, I'm gonna do it."

And I've been with, "Dead Fall" is my 23rd novel overall, I've been with Simon & Schuster the whole time, thanks to Cindy Jackson from Atlanta, Georgia.

- I mean, come on.

(chuckling) - Yeah.

And I can take it, Jeremy, one step further.

We went to check into our hotel, it was not, our room wasn't ready yet, and the desk, the manager said, "I'm so sorry Mr. And Mrs. Thor, we're getting it ready for you.

But there's a cafe around the corner.

Why don't you go over there, have a sandwich, have a cup of coffee, and by the time you get back, the room will be done."

We went over, we sat down, and I'm looking around and I find an English language newspaper, the old "International Herald Tribune."

So that's what I'm gonna read while we're waiting for our food, and I'm flipping through, and I find this little article about a Swiss intelligence officer who has embezzled money from the Swiss Army and is training his own shadow militia high in the Alps with high-tech weapons from his own private arsenal.

And I said, "That's the book I'm gonna write.

That's gonna be the genesis of the idea."

So that's how I got to international thrillers, and terrorism, and that kind of a thing.

- Wow.

(solemn music) What would you say is essential for a Brad Thor book?

What does it have to have?

- So there's some hallmarks.

I don't have a formula.

A lot of people say, "Oh, I wonder if he's got a formula."

I wish it was that easy.

I wish it was just like a cookie cutter and you could just mix up the ingredients for your cookies and you get a bestseller.

- Because I don't think "Dead Fall" follows a formula at all.

- None of 'em, none of 'em do.

So some of the hallmarks are, I want action on page one.

So that's the big thing.

The minute you open the book, I want something to be happening to draw you in.

I like short, crisp, cinematic chapters.

They're like Pringles.

So those quick, fast chapters, action on page one.

And I call what I do, Jeremy, faction, where you don't know where the facts end and the fiction begins.

So I do a ton of research for my books, but my number one job is to entertain you.

So I want you to have this white knuckle thill ride, but if you close my books a little bit smarter or having some questions about things, that's the icing on the cake for me as an author.

And so many people tell me, "I love to read your books with my laptop open or my phone right there because I Google stuff, 'cause I can't believe these things are real that you're talking about."

(solemn music) - I gotta ask about bad guys.

You've got some really, really bad guys in this.

What makes a believable bad guy?

- They've gotta be three-dimensional.

You have to have someone that's believable, and they have to have a reason they're doing what they're doing.

They can't all be megalomaniacs, and psychotic, and that kind of a thing.

So you do see that in really well-developed bad guys, you can actually relate to them a little bit, they make sense, what they're doing makes sense.

And they're a product of their environment, right?

So particularly with "Dead Fall," it was important to me to do the backstory of the guy who takes this mercenary unit and kinda peels off from the Russians and says, "We're not gonna listen to Moscow anymore."

It's a candy store in Ukraine.

- [Jeremy] Sure, sure.

- There's no law and order, we can go take whatever and whomever we want, so we're gonna go do that.

But to explain why that would appeal to this guy and the people working for him, you had to do his backstory, and so that's why I wanted that.

And I call him the colonel in this because I'm a big fan of "Apocalypse Now."

And so there was Colonel Kurtz in in that movie, so there is a little bit of that Marlon Brando character in the bad guy in "Dead Fall."

- I think so many times in these books, if you don't have that believable bad guy, they just don't sing as well, you know?

And so this time, I feel like it really does.

- Thank you.

- Brad, thank you.

- You're welcome.

- This was really enjoyable.

- My pleasure.

Thank you for having me, Jeremy.

- And thank you for watching "A Word On Words."

I'm Jeremy Finley.

Remember, keep reading.

(typewriter dinging) - [Brad] I signed for an ex-special operations person, and I said, "What do you want me to sign?"

And he said, "Stay in the fight."

So there is this mentality of, you're never out of the fight.

I really like that.

And when this gentleman said, "Sign it stay in the fight, and think about, you really should do that in all your books."

That's where stay in the fight came from.

(light music)